Carolyn Barnes is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches courses in the Global Health and Environment track.
Barnes' scholarship draws on multispecies ethnography, agrarian studies, medical anthropology, and science and technology studies to broadly examine how the dynamics of culture and capitalism converge to shape—and at times undermine—entangled human, animal, and environmental lives. As a lens into these processes, her ethnographic research and writing specifically examine the world of Thoroughbred horseracing in central Kentucky, where she was born and raised.